SBF and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Month

If you ever had The Odyssey as assigned reading, I hope the meaning of it wasn’t lost on you. The story is as relevant today as it was when Homer put it in writing in the 7th century B.C.

It’s a long story, hence the use of the phrase “epic poem,” but his trials and tribulations come down to this. He was an arrogant SOB who pissed off the gods. The guy was cursed. After a decade of fighting the Trojan War, it took him another decade to get home to his wife and son, but only after much loss and heartache.

The ancient Greeks got it, and they created this story to teach the rest of us a lesson. Hubris never ends well.

That lesson may have been lost on Sam Bankman-Fried, however, because the guy doesn’t read books.

In an interview with a journalist when he was still a billionaire, the journalist said that they were addicted to reading, to which SBF replied, “Oh yeah? I would never read a book.”

There are, of course, many reasons why people don’t read books. It could be a lack of interest or time, dyslexia, or a preference for the audio version. SBF’s reasons for not reading are more arrogant. He goes on to explain.

“I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that. … If you wrote a book, you f---ed up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

That’s a shame because if anybody needs to read a book, it’s Sam Bankman-Fried. 

If he read The Odyssey, he might have learned something from a civilization that’s thousands of years old. The ancient bards would have taught him the folly of hubris and forces beyond even a billionaire’s control. 

SBF didn’t have a bad month. He’s on the cusp of a bad decade, and only the likes of Odysseus can help him navigate those troubled waters. Odysseus was a smart guy. He devised the Trojan Horse and played a cruel trick on the one-eyed giant Polyphemus. He learned the hard way that being cunning doesn’t make you a god. It’s a great story, even if it can’t be explained in a six-paragraph blog post.